


Page of Wands

by BoxOnTheNile



Series: Storm [7]
Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fae, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, BACK ON MY BULLSHIT, Dragon Minkowski, Gen, Siren Eiffel, surprising no one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-08-23 05:34:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20237575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BoxOnTheNile/pseuds/BoxOnTheNile
Summary: It never occurs to him to be scared ofthem. He's sober for the first time in years, he could Thrall them if he really wanted to.He doesn't want to. They trust him, by some measure of the word, even if Minkowski calls him a fish with a hint of derision sometimes. They're human and sometimes they register as food so much he has to lock himself in the comms room and breathe, head between his knees and sharp, predator teeth digging into his bottom lip....It never occurs to him to be afraid of them. He should have been.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Back at it again with my bullshit magic aus.

Doug finds music.

It’s almost painful, the way the music fills a hollowness in his chest he had grown used to. Sirens are _made _for Song, and in the absence of another Siren, they take what they can get. 

<strike>What he did to his baby girl is unforgivable.</strike>

Hera calls his name several times before he responds, that first time, and he blinks, shaking his head to clear it. “Huh?”

“Are you okay, Eiffel?” she asks. “You sorta… got lost there, and there’s nothing in my files about Mer and trances or whatever just happened. Do you need me to call Hilbert? Once he’s less on fire, of course.”

“No, no, I’m okay,” he reassures her quickly, and she hums in disbelief. “Just… can we isolate where this is coming from?” He’s already messing with his comms panel, trying to clean up the signal, calculate its trajectory, _anything _to keep it playing.

His own Song swells in response, and he bites his cheek before he can Sing it. _Find me_, his magic calls, _I’m here, find me, Sing with me!_

It fizzles out into static, and that empty place for Song yawns and almost swallows him. It hurts in a way that isn’t physical or explicable. He barely bites back a scream, and the hurt, pitiful noise he makes does not go unnoticed. 

“Officer Eiffel?” Hera asks again, and he laughs, or sobs, he’s not certain. He hums under his breath, trying to ease the hollowness in his heart, and it doesn’t… _help_, per se, but he manages to drag himself into something resembling stable.

“Hera?” he says, and waits for her to acknowledge him. “That didn’t happen.”

* * *

Eiffel lives three lies in space.

The first is that he's Mer. It's safer that way. They're human, Hilbert and Minkowski, even if they're an alchemist and God-Chosen respectively. 

He can't bear to imagine them _afraid_ of him. 

So he Sings under his breath before eating meals designed for Mer, not for _him_, and walks the fine line of starvation. He's never hungry enough to slip up, but he's always, always tempted.

It never occurs to him to be scared of _them._ He's sober for the first time in years, he could Thrall them if he really wanted to.

He doesn't want to. They trust him, by some measure of the word, even if Minkowski calls him a fish with a hint of derision sometimes. They're human and sometimes they register as _food_ so much he has to lock himself in the comms room and breathe, head between his knees and sharp, predator teeth digging into his bottom lip.

The second lie is that it's not killing him, the Hephaestus. Not literally, but the separation from his Source in the Sea and the Moon leaves him feeling emptied out. Goddard is surprisingly accommodating for Inhumans, likely by virtue of Cutter being one, but even they can't send the whole Sea. He’s always just left of stable, just barely off center and that leaves him shakier than the nicotine withdrawal.

The third is that he doesn’t care.

He does. He cares deeply for Minkowski and Hilbert and even Hera. Especially Hera, who responds to his jokes with a sharper wit than <strike>even Kate</strike> he’s ever heard. He cares when Minkowski saves his stupid life in a spacesuit flooding with water that his gills can’t filter, he cares when Hilbert gets posessed by his damn plant monster(is it a dryad, technically? None of them are actually sure.) He cares a Hell of a lot when Hera’s power glitches and he can hear those awful echoes.

Doug is living three lies, but that’s okay. He’s not the only one.

* * *

It never occurs to him to be afraid of them. He should have been. 

As Hilbert floods the room with halothane, Doug panics and shifts. He has a minute, maybe, before the lack of oxygen knocks him out, but his gills can’t pull anything from the air, so the gas is mostly harmless. Sort of. He drags himself to the door, shoving against it until it opens and he tumbles out, the sharp edge of the opposite wall catching against his scales. He shoves away from the control room, shifting again as he goes, and gasps for breath hard enough it hurts and he chokes.

"Hera," he calls, a little desperate. "Hera, are you there?" 

She doesn't reply, and that's the most jarring thing that's happened yet. At some point he had started thinking of her as the soul of the station. He'd _forgotten_ that she was circuitry and not something more ineffable.

"Hera, talk to me. I need you, baby, come on, I can't stop Doctor Kevorkian alone, you gotta respond. Talk to me. Be here."

There's no answer, but he presses on. "I know what you're thinking, didn't I hear him? About the code and the program and the _whatever_, but you're more than that. You're more than that. You're named after a goddess, baby, and no one is more worthy than you. Talk. To. Me."

"E-e-eif-fel?"

She's glitching hard and spitting static and he can hear the pain in her voice.

"There you are, stay with me, stay with me. We're gonna do this together, and kick Sydney Sage in there to the curb."

"I don't know who that is."

"I'll explain later, what are our options?"

"All of my automated systems are still running and my emergency programs are unaffected, but I’m locked out of all the systems. If I try to do anything without a direct order from our new “Commander” this thing he put into my brain will shut me down. I don't have _any_ options." She pauses. "Unless…"

Eiffel _grins_. "Unless?"

* * *

He layers his voice with a Thrall when he speaks to Hilbert—_yes, tell me what you want, what you’re planning, you want to, need to_—and it’s worse than he could ever imagine. This is Command sanctioned.

It's well known you can never trust a vampire. Doug should've known better. 

Hera knows her code well, knows every loophole and backdoor, and the plan works perfectly. Minkowski isn't hurt by the lingering heat in the lower sections, thanks to the demigod blood in her veins, and Hera is goddamn _gleeful_ as she tells Hilbert no.

And then Hilbert rips her brain out of her head.

So Minkowski introduces her fist to his face.

And like that, it's over.

It's so, so far from over.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You have no idea how proud I am of that Sydney Sage joke, because it implies that Eiffel read not one but TWO vampire romance series. There's like fourteen books.
> 
> (Sydney Sage is an alchemist from the Vampire Academy/Golden Lily series, where all vampire bloodlines can be traced to like. Seven Russian families. It's the dumbest joke I've ever made.)


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Dragon and a Mer walk into a room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright today was bad so take a chapter

A Dragon and a Mer walk into a room.

It sounds like the set up for a bad joke, Minkowski thinks. Eiffel floats in one corner of the control room, jumpsuit shimmied down to his knees so he can treat the long cut on his thigh. Renée is so incredibly thankful he's not Fae, or the exposed steel of the station could have done much more damage than the shallow, jagged cut Eiffel is currently dabbing with disinfectant.

The musical transmission is still playing. Occasionally, Eiffel will hum a note or two before trailing off, but he's turned towards the speakers like he's basking in it, the way Renée basks in the sunlight or the rays of the star outside her station.

She wants to wrap him in her wings and claws and scales, hide him somewhere dark and safe. She's not certain when he changed from her crew to her _Hoard_, but he has.

So had Hilbert, and Hera. Stars, _Hera_.

"My husband's an Oracle," she says, apropos of nothing. Eiffel looks up at her and blinks. His eyes are pale and squinted—he's barely holding human form, and she makes a note to see if they can afford to flood the showers without Hera to run the water recyclers.

"I'm going to refrain from comments until you finish," he says, voice hollow. Behind him, staticy violins continue to play. She almost snaps at him to turn it off, but he's still tapping out the tempo while trying to bandage his cut. It’s almost like he _needs _it.

Funny, she thought it was _Sirens_ that needed music, but the idea of her Comms Officer hunting anything is laughable.

"My husband is an Oracle," she says again. "He _warned_ me about this. Said I'd face a betrayal. I never… I thought it'd be something simple or silly, not… this."

"Not this," he echoes, and Renée doesn't think he actually meant to. "Commander, this was planned. Hilbert was trying to contact Command. He had _orders._"

She's struck speechless. She doesn't know what to say, what to do. This runs so deep, and it's only going to get _worse_, somehow.

In her mind's eye, she sees The Tower, a tree struck by lightning, and shivers.

"I just wanted Yule to feel like a proper Sabbat," she mourns.

"It's my birthday," Eiffel replies. "I'm thirty-two."

The wave of exhaustion threatens to crush her. She wants Nik. She wants to wrap Eiffel up and cry.

Eiffel's arms wrap about her shoulders. He must need the comfort as much as she does. She pulls him to her chest, shoulders curving forward to shroud him in wings she doesn't currently have. He presses his face into her neck. "You're warm," he says. "God of fire thing or demigod in general thing?"

"Child of Vulcan thing," she says. It's not really a lie, the descendants of fire gods tend to run hot, she's just… not one of them. "And _you_ are are cold-blooded fish."

"Fish regulate their own body temperature, they're warm-blooded," Eiffel mumbles. He sounds as tired as she is. He might be falling asleep in her arms. "We're just set lower than you."

They both jerk violently when the comms panel starts to _clack-clack-clack_. 

"Attention: incoming pulse-beacon hail," the autopilot chimes with Hera's voice. "Would you like to open communications?"

"Right, Hilbert never got his call back," Eiffel says. He finally reaches over to turn off the transmission, and flinches a little when the sound cuts out. "What should we do?"

Renée breathes in. The fire in her belly glows warm, even in this form. "Let's get some answers."

The call rings for a long time, the seconds dragging on like months.

“Should it take this long?” Renée asks, and Eiffel waves a hand dismissively. The skin on the sides of his throat are worryingly pink, closer to gills than Renée is comfortable with. 

There’s a bright tone as the call connects, and Renée does not expect the voice that comes through.

“Hello Hephaestus~” Marcus Cutter nearly sings. “Am I coming through alright?”

She swallows. Eiffel needs her to be a commander right now. She's a fucking dragon, she won’t be intimidated by a _leech_. “Loud and clear, Canaveral. Would you like our verification codes?”

“Oh, there’s no need for that nonsense, Renée,” Cutter tells her. She can hear the unruffled smile in his voice. “It is such and unexpected _pleasure _to hear your voice.” 

There’s a Thrall in his voice now. It _slides _off her, dragon that she is, and she prays he’s focused on her alone, not Eiffel. Merfolk aren’t resistant to Thrall the way dragons are.

“Yes, sir. It’s been… too long.” She’s not sure how to respond to the Thrall, honestly. She hopes he writes it off as the distance and equipment rendering it inert. 

“That is has. Hell of a surprise, getting a call from you folks out there. Happy Yule~”

“Thank you, sir.”

“And _how _was your Sabbat, Renée?”

She swallows again. The Thrall skitters over her skin, stronger this time, and scales prickle at her chest and arms. “Eventful.”

“Oh, that sounds dramatic. What’s _**wrong**_?”

Eiffel’s hands fly up to grasp at his throat, eyes wide with shock. Cutter is pushing them to reveal the truth, and it’s almost forcing a shift in her Comms Officer, the way it's nearly dragging her scales to the surface.

He’s trying to force her hand, one way or another. Somehow, he knows _something._

Renée grits her teeth. She can’t play coy, she can’t dance around it. Not with Cutter holding Eiffel’s life in his hands like this.

“Commander,” Eiffel says, hoarse and breathless, “we have that thing? The one _on fire_?”

“One moment, sir,” Renée says quickly. “Hephaestus, put communications on hold.”

The thread of magic snaps, and Eiffel gasps for breath. “Commander, we can’t tell him. Hilbert had a plan, Minkowski, he had orders."

"Eiffel, you just—"

"I'll be okay," he promises, "you resisted it, so can I. I just wasn't expecting it. I didn't think it would work."

"I didn't think Mer were resistant," she says, something like hysteria rising in her chest. 

Eiffel smiles, lopsided and reassuring. “Not usually. I’m a little tougher than I look, Commander. I know you’re probably used to just tuning me out at this point, but we really can’t tell him. Not without him putting a team of Killer Commandos on the first train to the neighborhood, and that’s _if_ he doesn’t have a button that lets him blow up the station remotely.” He reaches out to touch her shoulder. “I don’t like flying the USS Mystery Machine any more than you, but… I’m pretty sure as long as we’re here, we have a gun pointed at us. We should act like it.”

He’s _right_, and she knows it. “What if you’re wrong?”

“Won’t be the first time. But I really don’t think I’m wrong.”

Renée draws in a steadying breath. This feels like active war, now, and she would know. She served in World War 2. “Hephaestus, reopen communications.” The intercom chimes as the signal opens again. “Apologies for the interruption, sir.”

“Completely understandable, Lieutenant. How’s the fire?”

“Resolved,” she answers.

“Wonderful! Now, I think you were saying something about something… eventful?”

Renée is so glad she’s practiced at lying by now. With three hundred years of experience, she can think on the fly. “At 1600 hours last night…”

* * *

Seven light years away, Marcus Cutter ends his transmission and gazes pensively at the pulse beacon transmitter on his desk. 

“Well,” he murmurs. “That changes things.”

Colonel Kepler and his team weren’t due back for another four days at least. That was plenty of time to start making preparations.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like dragons a lot, y'all.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have been _so productive_ with this vacation, guys.

The story Hilbert tells is this:

Four years ago, Goddard sent another crew to this deathtrap of a station. They were all human, except for the commander.

Captain Isabel Lovelace was Fae; a Changeling that had just _barely_ realized what she was. Captain Lovelace was as much an experiment as anything else on the fucking station(as _Decima_, and the very thought of it makes Doug want to claw out of his skin and scales). Can Fae go to space? Can they survive surrounded by iron, as long as they don't touch it? 

The answer was a resounding yes. Isabel Lovelace survived and thrived until the moment her escape craft fell into the star, but there was _nothing_ that could survive that. 

The carefully padded walls and tape-wrapped handholds were remnants of the faerie that had lived here before them. Remnants of a woman that had died trying to get home, after being lied to and used and abandoned.

Doug is fucking listless afterwards. It didn't matter. After everything she did, it didn't matter. She died, and there's no reason they won't, too.

"Eiffel?" Minkowski asks. Doug hums an acknowledgement. "What are you doing?"

He smooths another piece of duct tape over the frayed, split padding to wall outside the comms room. "Just… fixing a hazard."

"And the duct tape on the hand holds in engineering?"

"They're the only ones not wrapped and it, it helps with grip and…" He waves a hand vaguely. "Just trying to—"

"—to Fae-proof the station again?"

He sighs. "I know it's pointless. She's not coming back. But this was her station, too. It seems _wrong_ for it to be _dangerous_ for her."

"It was already dangerous."

"You know what I mean."

"I do. And I'm sure her soul is resting easier now." Minkowski touches his arm. "Have you eaten yet?"

"I keep food stashed in the comms room."

"Not what I asked."

He _had_ eaten, actually. Here was the thing; he could technically survive off the freeze dried sorta-food that was on the station. Technically. But he couldn't afford to miss a meal, ever, not if he wanted to go on with his charade of being Mer. He'd _kill_ someone, and then he'd probably throw himself out the damn airlock, and that was the _opposite_ of what anyone wanted. "Yeah, about an hour ago."

She frowns a little, brow creasing. "Hera?"

Hera, _Hera_, back and safe and not quite whole but _alive_, answers, "He did eat, Commander. Even did his usual praying thing first."

It wasn't praying, it was _Singing_, but Doug wasn't going to explain that. "See? I'm not gonna lie to you, Minkowski. There's enough lies on this station." Technically, he hasn't lied. No one has asked him outright what he is, just took the 'Mer' ident in his birth certificate as truth.

"Who do Mer even pray to?" Minkowski teases gently, and Eiffel shrugs.

"Ocean gods." He rips free another piece of tape. "The Sea itself. The Moon, sometimes."

"The Moon?"

"Yeah." He inspects the patch with a critical eye. "Tides and shit."

She watches him with an inscrutable expression. "Come eat with me anyway.”

“Yes, Commander,” he says. 

It's a nice change of pace, honestly. A break, where they make bets and coax Minkowski into talking about her husband. (His name is Nik and he's an honest to gods Oracle of Delphi and Minkowski's entire demeanor softens as she speaks. She loves him. Doug didn't know she _could_ love someone like that.)

* * *

All good things must end, though, because the plant-monster-that-may-be-dryad steals a screwdriver and Minkowski goes on the warpath, like a dragon whose territory has been invaded. Doug could almost believe she's a dragon, but she doesn't have a hoard. 

He takes to stashing snacks in his pockets after the first time he's left in a _net_ for four hours. He has to lock himself in the comms room for a while after that, until instinct dies down and he stops _longing_ to Sing Minkowski into a Thrall. 

If it would work. She shrugged off _Cutter's_ Thrall, when he couldn't. He's Siren, he's _resistant_ to other Thralls, but that one burrowed into his brain and demanded _truth_ to the point Doug almost sprouted gills. Even after he expected it, it was a struggle to hold it at bay.

"Hey, Commander," he says, casually, into his comms. He's wrapped up in a net for the third time this week, a meal bar hanging out of his mouth and the armory manifest pulled up on his tablet. "Did you know our armory has a harpoon?"

"Yep."

"Why _the fuck_ was there a harpoon?"

"Language, Officer Eiffel."

"I'm not on work rotation due to crazy trap reasons, you can't tell me what to do. Harpoon. For what god awful reason do we need one of those?"

"For insubordinate fish."

His stomach swoops, and he remembers the gun pointed at his head two months ago. "You wouldn't really—"

"No," she sighs, "I wouldn't. I might leave you netted like a tuna, but I wouldn't hurt you."

He bites the meal bar in half. _I want you to_, he thinks. _If I slip, if I try to hurt you, I want you to kill me._ "Thanks, Commander. You're pretty cool. For a human."

She scoffs. "Watch it, Eiffel. I could leave you there a little longer. Might be good for you to remember where you're at on the food chain." 

"You are paragon of human versatility and ingenuity, Commander Minkowski."

The door opens, and Minkowski pushes off the door frame to where the net connects to the ceiling. "That's better," she tells him, and sets him loose. He stuffs the other half of his meal bar into his mouth and begins the arduous process of untangling from a fishing net in zero-g. Minkowski grabs him by the shoulders and looks him over, like she's inspecting him damage. 

"Still in mint condition," he jokes. “Could you maybe stop trapping me, though?”

“You triggered it,” she says, already slipping back into whatever _insanity_ has possessed her. Doug accepts that she’s about to disappear into the vents again.

Until she comes creeping into the comms room in the middle of the “night” a few days later and tips into Doug’s arms. They’ve been doing this more, since… everything. The _family_ thing. The hot-metal scent of her aura is comforting, and he wishes for a second that humans could sense auras as well, so she would know how he tries to wrap her up in his soul.

“I think I’m a monster,” she mumbles. “It… It built a nightlight, Eiffel. It was just scared of the dark.”

“You’re not a monster,” Eiffel tells her, and even now, decades later, he can still taste blood in his mouth. “Did you leave it?”

“I did,” she says. She buries her face in his shoulder and breathes. “You always smell like seasalt, did you know that?”

He’s about to respond—_huh, do demigods have a soulsense, commander?—_when an alarm blares.

“Oh, that’s a new one,” Hera says. “That’s… a proximity alert?”

“A _what_ now?” Doug asks her as Minkowski pulls away.

“There’s a small spacecraft three hundred kilometers out and closing. I’m detecting… one lifeform inside.”

“Eiffel, open communications.”

“Aye, aye, Commander,” he says, already tapping at his console. There’s a beep, and he nods.”

Minkowski rolls her shoulders back, and Doug could swear the forge-fire smell of her soul grew stronger. “Attention. Unknown spacecraft: this is the U.S.S. Hephaestus Station. Please identify yourself.”

The channel crackles with static, and, “What? _Who _am I speaking to?”

“You are talking to the Commanding Officer of the U.S.S. Hephaestus. Now, I say again: please identify yourself.”

“No, no, no, I’m the Commander of the Hephaestus Station.” Doug looks at Minkowski and sees his horror in her face as well. “Captain Isabel Lovelace, U.S. Air Force, Commanding Officer of the U.S.S. Hephaestus, and Unseelie Fae. So who the hell are you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The padded station walls are _canon_ and I think that's hilarious.
> 
> P&C 72: Without gravitational friction, the only thing you can really "lean in" to is the walls of your station. This normally results in painful bruising, which is why we've installed all the padding.


End file.
